Yujiro Taniyama

Yujiro Taniyama (谷山雄二朗) is a video producer, perennial fringe political candidate, and comfort women denier. He has produced the first feature-length English-language denialist documentary titled “Scottsboro Girls.” The title for the film comes from the “Scottsboro Boys,” nine black teenagers falsely accused of raping white women, suggesting that Japan is also falsely accused of forcing women into sexual slavery.

Taniyama was invited by Japanese language instructor Mariko Okada-Collins to screen his film at Central Washington University in Spring 2015. The campus community put on multiple public events on the actual history of comfort women in protest, which were attended by hundreds of students and community members. See a series of articles about these events in the June 1, 2015 issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Newsletter.

While Taniyama’s film was widely applauded by Japanese conservatives including Yoshiko Sakurai, American writer and comfort women denier Michael Yondismissed the film as a “a disaster that needs to be edited with a chainsaw, or tossed out entirely” for anyone “who is serious about presenting the truth on the Comfort Woman issue to an educated western audience.”